Copyright, Disclaimer & Terms of Use

This blog does not operate for commercial purpose, but focuses on referee education and information only.

If you feel that any content is belonging to you exclusively or is misplaced, please contact us immediately so that we can remove it!

This also counts for comments which restrict you in your dignity and liberty, which are abusive or insultive. Sometimes such types of comments are not directly seen by this blog's administrators. In order to make them be removed as soon as possible, you can contact us via mail (see above).

Your chance to guess the referees who will take charge of the
fourthmatchday of UEFA Champions League - and to win a small prize
sponsored by our partners Refsworld UK. The results of the last matchday will be placed here in due course (the winner is already informed). You can find the referee observers here.

UEFA has selected the following eight officiating teams to take control over Wednesday's Champions League Matchday 3 ties. Artur Soares Dias of Portugal will make his debut in the biggest European football competition.

October 16, 2016

UEFA has selected the following eight officiating teams from seven different nations to take charge next Tuesday's Champions League Matchday 3 matches. Among others, Ruddy Buquet of France will return to CL turf.

The 3rd Team is one of the leading websites on international football refereeing. Started in June 2011, we focus on referee education, sharing news on international refereeing, discussing match situations and exchanging ideas (and much more).

'We' consist of a large variety of different people with different backgrounds who widely cannot give their full identity due to reasons of confidentiality. What unites us is that we love football and refereeing!

MISSION

Our
mission is to improve both football referees on individual level and football
refereeing as a whole. Our blog is supposed to serve as a platform to learn with
the aid of visual and written educational material. Furthermore, it is supposed to be a place where recent trends in international referees are reported, analyzed
and discussed.

CHALLENGE

Our
challenge is to fulfill the requirements arising from the different segments of
readers who follow our work:

- Top-class referees who are active at the highest international (UEFA) level or
in higher national leagues

-
Referees on middle football levels

- Referees
on lower amateur levels

- ‘Common’
people who are football and refereeing enthusiasts, but who are no referees
themselves.

VISION

Our
vision is a landscape of football and refereeing where …

- referees
are accepted and respected as the indispensable 3rd team of a football game- the
public (media, supporters, players) develop an understanding for the challenges
related to refereeing as well as referees perceive themselves as a
self-critical and modest part of the game instead of being vain and
unapproachable-
referee placement and selection decisions are based on performance -
politics, corruption and nepotism in refereeing are things of the past- referees
as well as referee managers carefully and self-critically reflect on their
behaviour to become better- open
discussion on hardened structures is allowed and blogs like ours are understood
as a necessity to make refereeing up-to-date in times of social media-
referees recognize the need to interpret their role as the one of a
game-manager facilitating fair competition following the laws of the game as
well as managing the match with empathy, open-minded communication and
contextual understanding for the benefit of football as a whole (for us, this
is what ‘modern refereeing’ requires).

VALUES

While pursuing these goals we follow the following values:

- Quality:
We strive for providing you with correct and qualitatively high information to
the best of our knowledge.

-
Exclusiveness: While quality goes over quantity, we attempt to provide you with
information out of first hand meaning that reporting exclusive news is a goal
we follow on our daily agenda.

-
Independence: We act independently and – like every good referee – are not
influenced by any third party. Our work is solely based on our very best
knowledge and passion as well as on the expectations of our readers.- Confidentiality:
As we often depend on the input our faithful friends and sources share
with us, confidentiality is essential and self-evident for us.

-
Self-reflection: We are convinced that you only become better if you critically
reflect yourself. Being open-minded for change, criticism and improvement drives us – and apart from that:
We also believe that these are qualities that separate good from very good
referees.

October 3, 2016

Thank to some federations, we already know the names of several referees appointed for the second Matchday of 2018 FIFA World Cup Qualifiers (UEFA Zone). The missing names, including observers, will be added in due course.